The person who proposes an improvement is assigned it, so proposals stop.
The sanction requires no hostility to improvement. Suggesting a change identifies the suggester as someone who has thought about it and is therefore the obvious person to do it, on top of existing work and usually without additional authority. After this has happened twice to anyone, the supply of suggestions falls to zero and the organisation concludes that its staff have no ideas.
In practice
- A suggestion scheme whose reward is ownership of the suggestion receives fewer entries each year.
- A meeting where the person naming the problem is handed it teaches everyone present not to name problems.
- Standing
- The mechanism is general and the saying is not; compare employee voice and employee silence, which describe the same suppression in organisational research.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life